Like to laugh? (We hope so!) How about test your knowledge with quizzes? Maybe you like keeping up with the trends? If any of these sound like you, you'll love our Kik Team Pick this week.

Chat with 'Pixable' to get the most interesting and shareable pics, videos, quizzes and more. Whether you're looking for cute animals, celebrity gossip, or just something to make you LOL, Pixable has got you covered!

Tip: Find other Promoted Chats on the ‘Find People’ screen. Check out this FAQ from our Help Center for more info.

This week the Kik Team Pick goes to the big screens with an upcoming independent film called A Girl Like Her. Based on a million true stories, the movie explores some confronting and perhaps familiar themes as it follows the story of three students: Avery (the popular girl), Jessica (her former friend), and Brian (Jessica’s best friend). Chat with A Girl Like Her on Kik to learn about the characters, the cast, watch the trailer, and more.

You can also chat with Avery to see what she's up to and find out what it’s like to walk a day in her shoes. A Girl Like Her hits select theaters on March 27.

Tip: Find other Promoted Chats on the ‘Find People’ screen. Check out this FAQ from our Help Center for more info.

This guest post is from Bret Neuman, senior social strategist at Cheezburger, the network of social humor and entertainment websites that commands a global monthly audience of 20 million people.

At Cheezburger, we want to give our audience a few minutes of happiness every day in the form of cute animals, memes, and hilarious fails. When we feed people’s need for cute and funny, they return the love, checking out our websites regularly and becoming loyal Cheezburger fans. That includes attracting more users to our latest mobile app, which lets people caption their own LOLcats or animated GIFs, and share them with friends.

When we discovered Promoted Chats on Kik, we knew we’d found a way to get even closer to the Cheezburger audience. Instead of publishing a single piece of content to the audience at large, like we do on other social networks and chat apps, we talk to Kik users in a one-to-one setting, responding with new links and pictures that drive deeper engagement with the Cheezburger brand. We can also send out weekly broadcast messages to all of our chatters – but unlike other channels, we use them to start conversations, not just blast out content.

The results of the one-to-one conversations we’re having through Promoted Chats are even better than we expected. We're seeing a much higher referral rate back to Cheezburger's sites from a broadcast message sent to our 80,000 chatters, compared to the same piece of content sent in a tweet to our almost 1.7 million followers on Twitter. Kik users are super engaged!

Promoted Chats are also easy to manage. Our small social team manages a large variety of channels and platforms, and our days are jam-packed disseminating and creating content for all of our social properties. We’d never be able to chat directly with so many Kik users – and drive people to our sites – without using Keywords with Promoted Chats. We’re having fun building out our list of responses, and seeing what encourages people to chat with us even more often.

We set up “Squee-Offs,” where we ask followers which of two cute animals they like the best, such as baby goats or baby sloths. Once they start chatting with us, we can send them more personalized content based on keywords in their responses. So, if someone says “baby goats forever!” we’ll reply with a “Team goats!” message and more pictures of goats. We’re even covered if someone tries to troll us by swearing:

Because we can keep adding to and refining our keywords and responses, we can discover what keeps the conversation going and give people even more of the fun Cheezburger content they want, both on Kik and on our website. The publisher tools that Kik provides allow us a much better way to drive referral traffic and interact with our fans than those available to us on other platforms.

In the future, we’re hoping to inject even more creativity into our chats on Kik. We’re thinking of building a “Kik your own adventure” experience, where we guide followers through a set of responses that lead them more deeply into the Cheezburger site. This is just one of many ideas we’re considering rolling out in the near future. We see plenty of possibilities for using Promoted Chats to get to know our fans better and look forward to having more fun with our chatters. And if you want to check us out on Kik, start a chat with “Cheezburger!”

As expected, Kik users were highly active on Valentine’s Day this year, chatting and sharing with their friends in near record numbers. A recent internal hack week project inspired the Secret Admirer concept -- a way to let you send a note to your “crush” anonymously but with a slight risk of getting caught (just like passing a note across the classroom in school). With some additional polish, the hack week project was brought to life and promoted through Kik Kupid, our Promoted Chat relationship guru that serves up gift ideas, jokes, pick up lines, and more.

We thought we would anonymize the data and see which states were the most daring, looking at the aggregate use of Secret Admirer as a percentage of the Kik users in each state.

Connecticut scored highest on our Crush Index, with a score of 1.47, meaning they were almost 50% more likely to send a note to a crush than the average state. Alaska scored lowest on the Crush Index with a score of only 0.48, and were only half as likely to send their crush a note. Other notable states at the top end were Montana and Massachusetts at 1.28; at the bottom end there were Utah (0.64) and South Dakota (0.61).

Keeping in mind that our user base is largely American youth (40% of Americans between 13 and 24 use Kik), our data contrasts what others have crowdsourced looking at love (Twitter) or romance (My Fitness Pal). We were curious why the Northeast was so daring -- was it the frightfully cold weather over the weekend there? Or perhaps inspired by some romantic Valentine’s Day movie? Just like your Secret Admirer’s identity, it’s probably more fun not to know.

This week we asked for your help getting into the Valentine’s Day mood by completing different challenges with KikKupid. We got some really awesome entries and had a blast reading them!

We chose one winning entry each day, and the lucky winners will get some cool Kik swag! Check out what the winners sent in:

Jokes

Pick-up Lines

Dates

Thanks to everyone who submitted entries this week. We hope you enjoyed chatting with Kupid! Even though the contest is over, Kupid is here to stay. He’ll always be ready to share his advice with you, all you need to do is ask

Earlier this week we introduced you to Kupid, and now he’s here with a fun new contest to help get you in the mood for Valentine’s Day!

We’ve heard lots of you are already having fun chatting with Kupid and trying out some of the awesome ideas he has for you. You’ll need to keep chatting with him about his love advice and ideas for the contest. On February 9, 11, and 12 we’ll announce a challenge on our Twitter feed. All you need to do is tweet us your completed challenge with the hashtag #KikKupid and you’ll be entered to win some wicked Kik prizes. We’ll DM the winner of each challenge so make sure you’re following @Kik.

Kik ‘CONTEST’ to Kupid for more info, and stay tuned to our Twitter throughout the week.

Kik passed 200 million registered users today. That’s good news. Two hundred million people have downloaded the app and created a Kik username. If each one of those users took five seconds to say, “Hi,” it’d take 31 years to get through them all. That’s a lot of people!

The truth is, it doesn’t really matter all that much. The number of users is an interesting stat, but, to be honest, we’d expect the number to be pretty high. Kik is in the top 20 for free apps in the U.S. in both iTunes and Google Play, so it’s no surprise that a lot of curious people will check out the app, play with it for a bit, and then leave.

You might then ask why we don’t talk more about monthly active users (MAU). Other companies make a big deal about MAU, but we think they might as well be called “minimally active users.” It’s a metric so easy to game that it becomes almost meaningless. For example, push notifications are so powerful for mobile that you can drastically increase MAUs just by blasting out a “Happy holidays!” and counting everyone who opened the app in response as “active.” That’s not for us.

In general, startups, the media, and investors care way too much about these numbers. You can count us in the same camp as Ev Williams. Kik is far more interested in building a product that people love and want to spend time with. We want to foster loyalty and keep our users coming back. We want them to be excited to open Kik.

We recently commissioned a study that showed Kik users spend 35 minutes per session in our app. That compares to 37 minutes for Facebook, 27 minutes for Instagram, and 21 minutes for Snapchat. According to BI Intelligence, Kik users spend 97 minutes a week in the app, ahead of Snapchat (42 minutes), Viber (40 minutes), and Facebook Messenger (21 minutes). Those are the sorts of numbers that get us excited.

For a chat app that depends on frequent, meaningful conversation among peers, engagement is the golden goose. An obsession with minimally active users would contradict the very thing we set out to achieve. It might be a metric that attracts attention and money, but it incentivizes the exact sort of behavior we want to avoid.

So while we’re excited about today’s milestone and Kik’s continued growth, we’re not going to take long to celebrate. We’re keeping our heads down and working hard to figure out how to keep our users happy and coming back for more. Two hundred million is a great number, but 35 minutes is where the real action is. The next task is to get that up to 38.

We’re excited to share some really big news today: we’ve reached 200 million users on Kik! It’s so awesome to know that we’ve become a part of so many people’s lives.

Thinking about how much we’ve grown is pretty wild, and without the help of our incredible users we wouldn’t be where we are today. You’re the reason we keep doing what we’re doing, and from the bottom of our hearts, we’d like to say thank you.

As a special thank you for helping us hit this milestone, we’ve sent our 200 millionth user some Kik swag

Thank you for being such fantastic users! We’re getting back to it, working on more ways to make Kik even more amazing. Got some ideas or feedback? Let us know in the comments.

This week’s Kik Team Pick puts a super cute new pal right in your pocket – a NumNum! NumNums love to try on new outfits, work at different jobs, and play with other NumNums. But be careful – to keep your NumNum happy, you’ll need to make sure you feed it and keep it company.

Use gems to replenish your energy so you can complete more jobs, and do more with other NumNums! Out of gems? No problem! Redeem your Kik Points to get more gems and keep your NumNum happy.

TIP: Chat with NumNums to get started, just search for their username ‘NumNumBot’. You can find other Official Accounts on the ‘Find People’ screen. Check out this FAQ from our Help Center for more info.

Kik blog

Kik is the only smartphone messenger that lets you connect with all your friends, no matter where you meet - at school, on your favorite social app, or in an online game. In our blog, you'll find the inside scoop on Kik, little tidbits about our team, and lots, lots more!